Nonetheless there is something deeply profound and kind of humbling about holding this delicate little robot in my hand. I've spent my whole life creating virtual things - computer programs, graphics, music - and now it is possible to use the exact same skills to produce something who's physical structure may well outlast that of my own. Walking through Roman ruins earlier this year I realised that there is something about hard physical matter that is so important. Seeing a marble carving of some guy's face which has outlasted his original face by so many thousands of years really drove it home.

Last year I also read "Matter" by Iain M. Banks and although it didn't grab me as much as some of his previous books, there was an interesting argument about virtuality from one of his characters. The essence of the argument was that we don't inhabit a virtual universe overseen by some creator or creator race because any sufficiently advanced entity or culture would not allow the terrible things that can happen to sentient beings in our universe, to occur. It's sort of a meta-ethical argument saying that we can't be anywhere other than at the top of the stack of turtles, if the ethics of highly evolved intelligences are always consistent.

On a related note, this blog post makes the case that in software development the execution of an idea is much more important than the idea. I have come to believe that this is true in general. Because we now live in this highly populated and deeply connected age, ideas have become cheap. Real things, done things, executed things, are better than virtual things and ideas.

This decade is going to be fascinating because of the increasing protrusion of the virtual into the real and the modification of the real by the virtual. Bring on the self configuring household ornaments built of programmable nanotech, such as a flower which has as many petals as there are emails in your inbox.

Virtual things are ok, but real things are better.

PS If you like these you can also order them from my Shapeways profile.

Name                Chris McCormick
Registration Number xxxxx
Destination         Fremantle
Number of Boxes     2

Box - 1

Number Description                                     Purchased Value
8      Books                                           UK        40
15     Books                                           Australia 20
2      Art prints                                      UK        75
4      Clothes                                         Australia 10
2      Vinyl beanbag covers                            UK        50
1      Pack of business cards                          Australia 0
1      Clock                                           UK        14
1      Air mattress pump (electric)                    UK        5
1      Midi controller (electronic musical instrument) Australia 75
1      Blanket                                         UK        4
1      Drum machine (electronic musical instrument)    UK        50

Box - 2

Number Description                                     Purchased Value
2      Books                                           Australia 10
2      Handbags                                        UK        20
9      Pairs of shoes                                  Australia 60
20     Clothes                                         Australia 20
1      Hat                                             UK        4
2      Plastic toy pidgeon                             UK        5
4      Vinyl records (bowie)                           UK        4
10     Photos (personal)                               UK        0
5      Theatre programmes (personal)                   UK        0
10     Fridge magnets (personal)                       Australia 0
16     Birthday/Christmas/Anniversary cards (personal) UK        0

So long, London. Until next time!

This screenshot is as far as I got during the latest GameJam, which has been running in my home town, Perth. I joined remotely from here in London, but unfortunately I just didn't manage to squeeze in the time to make the game I was hoping to. I did manage to advance the MinimalistPlatformer codebase quite a bit further than it was towards the larger platformer game I have cooking away in the back of my mind though, so that's quite positive. Hopefully I'll get some more time to continue this work, and maybe even produce some binaries of my GameJam entry at some point.

If I had time to make a game right now, this would be it. Basically it looks and plays a bit like Asteroids, but the rocks don't fly around crushing you - they hang still in space, and you shoot the coloured ones to get minerals from them. It's multiplayer and set in a persistent universe, so I guess that makes it an MMO. You can fly up to other people and talk to them, trade items with them, etc.

I remember the intense excitement of the first time I played a MUD, back in the mid 90s. It wasn't the game element of it that excited me - it was the exploration and social elements. I guess I am a fan of virtual worlds more than games in that respect. I'm not that interested in grinding.

Asteroids TNG would be a bit like Diabolo, but in space and with vector graphics. That is to say, there are some asteroids that you can land on, and when you do, the game turns into a Roguelike with one short 'dungeon' per asteroid, and simple vector graphics instead of ASCII graphics. All of the monsters would be futuristic alien sounding monsters, and instead of wands and scrolls you would find rayguns, data nodes, and nanotech stems, and instead of armour you would find field generators and shielding, etc. You get to keep the inventory of things you find in the asteroid 'dungeons', and you can trade these items with other people. Later there would be space stations where you could dock to meet up with people.

The whole thing would be procedurally generated using Perlin noise to generate an infinite asteroid map, and Rogue-like logic to generate the asteroid dungeons. Lately I have been reading and obsessing over the source code of Donny Russell's AGB Rogue, which is a conversion of the original BSD Rogue for the Gameboy Advance, and probably my all-time favorite Rogue. It goes with me everywhere on my Nintendo DS. The code is incredibly unclean, but it's fun to look at the probability tables and dungeon generating functions to get an insight into how they balance the game.

The music would be chippy as hell.

Won't someone give me a wad of cash to make this social roguelike space MMO? I swear I will port it to Nintendo DS, iPhone, web, Xbox360, widgets, gadgets, screenlets, Windows, MacOS, Linux, and the Wii, and make you millions of dollars.